Texas Frontier Life

I don't know how I'd missed reading Frank Collinson's "Life in the Saddle", but I had. The author left his middle-class family in England for Texas in 1872 at age 17 and his account of his experiences thereafter is probably unmatched, starting with his description of arriving in Galveston and boarding the train of the G.H.& S.A. Rwy. Co. that took him as far as Flatonia, which was then the end of the line, and traveling by wagon then to San Antonio.

My guess is that Larry McMurtry spun most of "Lonesome Dove" out of Collinson's stories. Here's a sample from Collinson, describing Fort Griffin in NW Texas ca. 1875:

"The buffalo hunters and the skinners, fresh from a womanless country farther west, flocked to Fort Griffin for a fling, their pockets bulging with money. Hardened surveyors and their assistants rode into town with compass and chain after locating countless sections of previously unappropriated land. Bullwhackers and sunburned, bewhiskered soldiers just returned from the indescribable hardships of a Staked Plain campaign with Mackenzie filled the barbershops for shaves and haircuts and hot baths in the tin tubs in the rear. Black sheep from prominent familiers elsewhere flocked to Fort Griffin to forget the past and begin life anew. Questionable women stayed in their shoddy rooms by day, but came boldly out at night when the fiddles began to play, flitting about the saloons, dance halls, and gambling dens like bright butterflies."

The relevance of this to land surveying is that Collinson gives an amazingly good description of frontier life in North and West Texas during the period when most of the land was surveyed off and so describes the circumstances within which the surveys were made. Of the Texas Surveyors, only T.U. Connelly and Lt. John L. Bullis are mentioned by name.